Egypt Cemetery With 1 Million Mummies Unearthed From 1,500 Years Ago

The team of archaeologists from Brigham Young University in the US found the mummified remains in an area that they have named Fag el-Gamous, (Way of the Water Buffalo) after a road close to the site.

Archaeologists have been excavating the Fag el-Gamous site and pyramid close by, for almost 30 years.

Most of the mummies have been dated to a time when Roman Empire ruled Egypt, from the 1st to the 7th century AD.

Bodies tended to be clustered by hair color, like this one with long blonde hair that is thought to be female.

“I don’t think you would term what happens to these burials as true mummification,” project director Kerry Muhlestein said. “If we want to use the term loosely, then they were mummified.”

According to Muhlestein, the bodies were “mummified” following their burial by the region’s arid climate. However, researchers have found several examples where burial wrappings, pottery, and jewelry were in good condition.

“A lot of their wealth, as little as they had, was poured into these burials,” Muhlestein said.

“There is indeed a site that contains many corpses and bodies wrapped in a thick textile,” Khalifa said. “But these number in the tens of thousands, maximum.”

“We are fairly certain we have over a million burials within this cemetery. It’s large, and it’s dense,” Kerry Muhlestein from Brigham Young University, said in a paper which he presented at the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities Scholars Colloquium, in Toronto.

The people buried here were often laid to rest without personal memorabilia in their graves and without coffins, the researchers said.